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When I was a child, I devoured books until my vision grew hazy. When my GCSEs came around, I demonstrated the endurance of a monk, revising for hours without a break. But in recent years, I’ve observed that capacity for deep concentration dissolve into infinite browsing on my phone. My focus now contracts like a snail at the tap of a thumb. Engaging with books for pleasure feels less like sustenance and more like endurance training. And for a person who writes for a profession, this is a professional hazard as well as something that made me sad. I wanted to restore that cognitive flexibility, to stop the mental decline.

So, about a twelve months back, I made a small promise: every time I came across a word I didn’t know – whether in a novel, an article, or an overheard conversation – I would research it and write it down. Not a thing fancy, no leather-bound journal or stylish pen. Just a running list kept, ironically, on my smartphone. Each week, I’d spend a few moments reading the collection back in an attempt to imprint the word into my memory.

The record now covers almost 20 pages, and this tiny ritual has been quietly transformative. The benefit is less about showing off with obscure adjectives – which, to be honest, can make you sound unbearable – and more about the cognitive exercise of the practice. Each time I look up and note a word, I feel a faint expansion, as though some underused part of my mind is flexing again. Even if I never use “phantom” in conversation, the very act of spotting, logging and revising it interrupts the slide into inactive, semi-skimmed attention.

There is also a diary-keeping element to it – it functions as something of a diary, a record of where I’ve been reading, what I’ve been pondering and who I’ve been hearing.

Not that it’s an simple routine to keep up. It is frequently very impractical. If I’m reading on the tube, I have to stop mid-paragraph, pull out my device and enter “millennialism” into my digital document while trying not to bump the person squeezed against me. It can reduce my pace to a frustrating speed. (The Kindle, with its built-in lexicon, is much kinder). And then there’s the revising (which I frequently forget to do), conscientiously browsing through my expanding word-hoard like I’m studying for a vocabulary test.

In practice, I incorporate maybe 5% of these words into my everyday conversation. “unreformable” made the cut. “Lugubrious” as well. But the majority of them remain like exhibits – admired and listed but seldom handled.

Nevertheless, it’s rendered my mind much sharper. I find myself turning less often for the same overused handful of descriptors, and more often for something exact and muscular. Rarely are more gratifying than discovering the perfect word you were searching for – like locating the lost component that snaps the picture into position.

In an era when our devices drain our attention with merciless efficiency, it feels rebellious to use mine as a tool for deliberate thinking. And it has restored to me something I feared I’d forfeited – the pleasure of exercising a intellect that, after a long time of slack browsing, is at last stirring again.